In order to qualify as a global fashion brand, a label must sell more than clothes. Accessories are a given. After more than ten years in the business, Roland Mouret, the British based designer who brought us the Galaxy and Moon dresses, as worn by every celebrity from Rachel Weisz and Keira Knightley to Cameron Diaz, revealed his own world of shoes in Paris today.

Mouret's shoes are being manufactured by Robert Clergerie, a middling sized French shoe label that enjoyed considerable success in the 1980s doing masculine-styled shoes for women, but which waned recently, as shoes became higher and sexier.

Earlier this year Clergerie announced its new designer: Roland Mouret. His first collection for the brand, with a strong 1940s feel, but with contemporary proportions (i.e. lots of height) will arrive in stores in late summer. The partnership also enables him finally to have a separate shoe collection, under his own name - also high, also with (concealed) platforms, and with a heel shape and last that spell out the initial R when viewed from the side.

"Comfort," he retorts, "It's to do with balance, the angle of the last - not just the heel. I've spent a lot of time listening to what women want," he says, "and they're not giving up on heels any time soon. But they're tired of suffering".

The other step towards brandifation is to hire a lavish venue - and transform it. Mouret did that too as he clad the ornately gilded walls of the Hotel Intercontinental's ballroom with rough wooden planks.

"It's supposed to evoke what you do to a precious building when you want to protect it in a war,' he explained.

If it looked more like a Club Med ski chalet , that suited the first few outfits perfectly, since they featured faint tracings of reindeer or fawn prints and came in an icy blue shade which could have been Wallis Simpson blue, but which Mouret said was Dior blue (don't say he's auditioning for that job too).

Mouret's silhouette has loosened considerably since the suction-packed hourglass of the Galaxy and Moon, but it's still tailored and intensely feminine, with loving attention paid to a woman's rear. "You have to be really confident about your tush to wear that", observed one front rower as a Dior blue dress, with a zip right up the back, sashayed past. Either that or invest in Spanx.